D’Amato: New generation of female engineers is legacy of Dec. 6

CANDLE

Peter Lee/Record staff

A student places a rose next a candle during a local vigil to commemorate lives of 14 women murdered at Ecole Polytechnique in Montreal in 1989. The vigil was held Wilfrid Laurier University Faculty of Social Work in Kitchener.

On Dec. 6, 1989, Mary Wells was a young engineer working at Stelco in Hamilton. She got home, started to make dinner and turned on the news. And she heard that 14 young female engineering students were murdered by a lone gunman. They were killed because they were women.

“My heart just stopped when I heard it,” said Wells. “It was horrible. They were my age. And it was in Montreal, where I had grown up.”

Wells had graduated with her engineering degree just two years earlier, from McGill University in Montreal. Some of her classmates had gone on to graduate work at l’Ecole Polytechnique, where the massacre had happened. Wells’ mother, a professor at McGill, had a student whose sister had been one of the 14 victims.

Today, Wells fights back at that terrible assault through her work, encouraging young people, and particularly girls, to get into engineering as a career. Wells is the associate dean of outreach at the University of Waterloo’s faculty of engineering. The position, set up by former dean Adel Sedra, is unique in Canada, she says.

Wells starts with girls still in elementary school. One of her programs involves working with the Girl Guides to set up an engineering badge that girls can earn in Grades 4 to 6. The girls come for a day and talk to engineers, visit the lab and work on projects that show how engineering solves all kinds of practical problems. They might design a bike helmet that will protect from head injuries, or make filters to take dirt out of water.

There are other programs for girls in high school. One involves Grade 11 girls who stay for a weekend on campus and meet female engineers. They have a game where they design ways to rescue a prince who is trapped in a tower, in a feminist twist on the fairy tale Rapunzel. Of the 50 students who came last time, 30 applied to university engineering programs. “We were happy with that,” said Wells.

On Thursday there were remembrance ceremonies at both University of Waterloo and at Wilfrid Laurier University. White ribbons were worn, candles were lit and the names of the victims displayed. The current students, many of whom weren’t even born when the massacre happened, have to be reminded every year about of that terrible day.

As we remember those victims, it is also worth remembering that University of Waterloo now has a female dean of engineering.

There are 45 female engineering professors there now, compared with just two in 1989.

There are 1,315 undergraduate and graduate female students in engineering, about three times as many as the 436 in 1989.

These numbers are inspiring. But they didn’t happen by accident. They happened because of commitment and hard work on the part of men and women like Wells, who responded to the terrible events of Dec. 6, 1989 by working to empower more women.

By opening the doors wide to the engineering classrooms of the University of Waterloo, Wells and her colleagues are commemorating those 14 fallen women in the best possible way.